Borrowell is primarily recognized for offering free credit scores, but the company also provides a comprehensive marketplace of financial products, including credit cards, personal loans and car loans. To drive revenue growth, the company wants to elevate its brand awareness beyond free credit scores and convert users seeking financial products into loyal customers.

Expanding ads to credit cards and loans faced roadblocks, leading to less effective user acquisition and revenue outcomes. Limited resources and Engineering support prevented changes, forcing us to work with the existing setup.

• Sign up flow: No dedicated flow for each product. It only mentions free credit scores and is lengthy. It could be streamlined to require just a name and email address. A user could be prompted later in app or via email to complete the entire flow.
• Fragmented user experience: A significant gap exists between the information conveyed in ads and the post-sign-up dashboard. While the dashboard displays a user's credit score and product recommendations, it lacks personalization based on the financial product clicked in the ad.
• Specific campaigns: Credit card and personal loan campaigns have higher CPAs due to disassociation during sign-up and more competitive CPCs.

Brainstorm with Marketing team
Propose A/B test ideas
Visual design
Animation
HTML5 ads
Video editing
Art direction

Testing free credit score ads across channels, we found that a score of 738 performed best. Our hypothesis is that 738 is seen as achievable and aspirational, being close to the Canadian average of 672 and above the prime score of 660, making it more attractive to lenders.

Given limited resources and an inconsistent user experience, we compensated by integrating financial product mentions with the free credit score offer. This dual-message approach in a single ad was challenging, but necessary. We extended this combined messaging to the landing pages as well.

As the top three performing product verticals, we tested ads for car loans, credit cards and loans.
Types of ads: Static, animation, video, HTML5 animated
Channels: Paid Social (Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft Ads, Google Ads

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HTML5 Ads:

Credit cards (300x250, 728x90)

Loans (300x600, 300x250)

• We discovered that Microsoft Ads are more cost-effective than Paid Social, leading to a 9% MoM increase in acquisition for free credit score campaigns.
• By launching nine experiments in a quarter across three paid ad channels, we learned that this approach can significantly boost MoM acquisitions by approximately 17%.
• We did see some success within the campaigns, but it was mainly the free credit score ads.
• Short-term plan: Due to the Engineering complexity of updating the sign-up flow and dashboard, we should currently focus ad messaging on free credit scores, where we've seen the most success. We can then test retargeting campaigns to promote Borrowell's personalized financial products based on users' scores.‍
• Long-term plan: To further enhance our strategy, we should conduct user research to identify customer pain points in the current flow. Then iterate on the user experience testing different funnels for credit card, car loan and personal loan ads.

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